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Speech act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Precise
conceptions vary. In general, "speech act" refers to the act of
successfully communicating an intended understanding to the
listener. Speech acts also include greetings, criticism,
invitations, congratulations etc.

This is different from the term "locutionary act", which is the
specific and physical act of creating an utterance. While a
locutionary act is required for a speech act to occur, the
locutionary act represents simply the physical sounds uttered, or
the scribbles written, which will then need interpretation. Because
of this difference, "speech act" is often considered a synonym for
John Searle's term "illocutionary act", explained
below.

Speech act as an
illocutionary act

The concept of an illocutionary act is central to, if
not identical with, the concept of a speech act. Although there are
numerous opinions as to what 'illocutionary acts' actually are,
there are some kinds of acts which are widely accepted as
illocutionary, as for example promising, ordering someone, and
bequeathing.

According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea
of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasising that "by
saying something, we do something", as when someone orders
someone else to go by saying "Go!", or when a minister joins two
people in marriage saying, "I now pronounce you husband and wife."
(Austin would eventually define the "illocutionary act" in a more exact
manner.)

Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An
interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that performed in
the utterance of what Austin calls performatives, typical instances
of which are "I nominate John to be President", "I sentence you to
ten years' imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back." In these
typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the
action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing,
promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence
itself.

Examples

Greeting (in saying, "Hi John!", for instance), apologizing
("Sorry for that!"), describing something ("It is snowing"), asking
a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request and giving an order
("Could you pass the salt?" and "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot
you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back") are
typical examples of "speech acts" or "illocutionary acts".

In saying, "Watch out, the ground is slippery", Mary performs
the speech act of warning Peter to be careful.

In saying, "I will try my best to be at home for dinner", Peter
performs the speech act of promising to be at home in time.

In saying, "Race with me to that building over there!", Peter
challenges Mary.

Classifying
illocutionary speech acts

Searle (1975)[1] has set
up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:

assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker
to the truth of the expressed proposition

directives = speech acts that are to cause the
hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and
advice

commissives = speech acts that commit a
speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths

expressives = speech acts that expresses on
the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g.
congratulations, excuses and thanks

declarations = speech acts that change the
reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g.
baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband
and wife

Indirect
speech acts

In the course of performing speech acts we ordinarily
communicate with each other. The content of communication may be
identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be
communicated, as when a stranger asks, "What is your name?"

However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there
are linguistic means, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can
be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content
intended to be communicated. One may, in appropriate circumstances,
request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or one
can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!" One common way of
performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one
speech act, and indeed performs this act, but also performs a
further speech act, which is indirect. One may, for instance, say,
"Peter, can you open the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he
will be able to open the window, but also requesting that he do so.
Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly)
performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.

Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and
to make requests. For example, a speaker asks, "Would you like to
meet me for coffee?" and another replies, "I have class." The
second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal.
This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does
not entail any sort of rejection.

This poses a problem for linguists because it is confusing (on a
rather simple approach) to see how the person who made the proposal
can understand that his proposal was rejected. Following
substantially an account of H. P. Grice, Searle
suggests that we are able to derive meaning out of indirect speech
acts by means of a cooperative process out of which we are able to
derive multiple illocutions; however, the process he proposes does
not seem to accurately solve the problem. Sociolinguistics has studied the
social dimensions of conversations. This discipline considers the
various contexts in which speech acts occur.

John
Searle's theory of "indirect speech acts"

Searle has
introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act', which in his
account is meant to be, more particularly, an indirect
'illocutionary' act. Applying a conception of such illocutionary
acts according to which they are (roughly) acts of saying something
with the intention of communicating with an audience, he describes
indirect speech acts as follows: "In indirect speech acts the
speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by
way of relying on their mutually shared background information,
both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers
of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer." An account
of such act, it follows, will require such things as an analysis of
mutually shared background information about the conversation, as
well as of rationality and linguistic conventions.

In connection with indirect speech acts, Searle introduces the
notions of 'primary' and 'secondary' illocutionary acts. The
primary illocutionary act is the indirect one, which is not
literally performed. The secondary illocutionary act is the direct
one, performed in the literal utterance of the sentence (Searle
178). In the example:

(1) Speaker X: "We should leave for the show or else we’ll be
late."

(2) Speaker Y: "I am not ready yet."

Here the primary illocutionary act is Y's rejection of X's
suggestion, and the secondary illocutionary act is Y's statement
that she is not ready to leave. By dividing the illocutionary act
into two subparts, Searle is able to explain that we can understand
two meanings from the same utterance all the while knowing which is
the correct meaning to respond to.

With his doctrine of indirect speech acts Searle attempts to
explain how it is possible that a speaker can say something and
mean it, but additionally mean something else. This would be
impossible, or at least it would be an improbable case, if in such
a case the hearer had no chance of figuring out what the speaker
means (over and above what she says and means). Searle's solution
is that the hearer can figure out what the indirect speech act is
meant to be, and he gives several hints as to how this might
happen. For the previous example a condensed process might look
like this:

Step 1: A proposal is made by X, and Y responded by means of an
illocutionary act (2).

Step 2: X assumes that Y is cooperating in the conversation,
being sincere, and that she has made a statement that is
relevant.

Step 3: The literal meaning of (2) is not relevant to the
conversation.

Step 4: Since X assumes that Y is cooperating; there must be
another meaning to (2).

Step 6: X knows that Y has said something in something other
than the literal meaning, and the primary illocutionary act must
have been the rejection of X's proposal.

Searle argues that a similar process can be applied to any
indirect speech act as a model to find the primary illocutionary
act (178). His proof for this argument is made by means of a series
of supposed "observations" (ibid., 180-182).

Analysis using Searle's
theory

In order to generalize this sketch of an indirect request,
Searle proposes a program for the analysis of indirect speech act
performances, whatever they are. He makes the following
suggestion:

Step 1: Understand the facts of the conversation.

Step 2: Assume cooperation and relevance on behalf of the
participants.

Step 5: If steps 1–4 do not yield a consequential meaning, then
infer that there are two illocutionary forces at work.

Step 6: Assume the hearer has the ability to perform the act
the speaker suggests. The act that the speaker is asking be
performed must be something that would make sense for one to ask.
For example, the hearer might have the ability to pass the salt
when asked to do so by a speaker who is at the same table, but not
have the ability to pass the salt to a speaker who is asking the
hearer to pass the salt during a telephone conversation.

With this process, Searle concludes that he has found a method
that will satisfactorily reconstruct what happens when an indirect
speech act is performed.

History

For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of
language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual
assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored.
The work of J. L.
Austin, particularly his How to Do Things with Words,
led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses
of language. The terminology he introduced, especially the notions
"locutionary
act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", occupied an
important role in what was then to become the "study of speech
acts". All of these three acts, but especially the "illocutionary
act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts".

Adolf Reinach
(1883–1917) has been credited with a fairly comprehensive account
of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long
before Austin and Searle. His work had little influence, however,
perhaps due to his death at 33 in the German Army at the onset of
war in 1914.

The term "Speech Act" had also been already used by Karl Bühler in his
"Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften”, Kant-Studien 38
(1933), 43, where he discusses a Theorie der
Sprechhandlungen and in his book Sprachtheorie (Jena:
Fischer, 1934) where he uses "Sprechhandlung" and
"Theorie der Sprechakte".

Historical
critics

Critical theorists in other areas of critical theory use speech
act theory as a way of approaching aspects of their own discourse.
It is used mainly in the fields of linguistics and philosophy,
meaning that, in speaking, a person is doing so through a
particular set of pre-set conventions. The basics of the theory
centre on the idea that words, when placed together, do not always
have a fixed meaning. Austin’s work has had many critics; Gorman
(1999, p.109) explains that many people have used his work without
fully understanding its criticisms, and Austin’s main arguments
have had only one notable follow up work, that by Searle in 1969.
Speech-act theory is a continuing discourse, still written about
and criticised in hundreds of articles and books. MacKinnon (1973,
p.235) states that ‘the various conceptual systems we have
indicated are only intelligible as extensions of an ordinary
language framework’, meaning that, as its basis, the theory must
first have an already working or ‘ordinary’ set of rules that are
indisputable and reliable.

In
language development

Dore (1975) proposed that children's utterances were
realizations of one of nine primitive speech acts:

labelling

repeating

answering

requesting (action)

requesting (answer)

calling

greeting

protesting

practicing

In computer
science

Speech act theory has been used to model conversations for automated classification
and retrieval[8].

Another highly-influential view of Speech Acts has been in the
'Conversation for Action' developed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
in their 1987 text "Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New
Foundation for Design". Arguably the most important part of their
analysis lies in a state-transition diagram (in Chapter 5) that
Winograd and Flores claim underlies the significant illocutionary
(speech act) claims of two parties attempting to coordinate action
with one another (no matter whether the agents involved might be
human-human, human-computer, or computer-computer).

A key part of this analysis is the contention that one dimension
of the social domain- tracking the illocutionary status of the
transaction (whether individual participants claim that their
interests have been met, or not) is very readily conferred to a
computer process- independent of whether the computer has the means
to adequately represent the real world issues underlying that
claim. Thus a computer instantiating the 'conversation for action'
has the useful ability to model the status of the current social
reality independent of any external reality on which social claims
may be based.

This transactional view of speech acts has significant
applications in many areas in which (human) individuals have had
different roles- for instance- a patient and a physician might meet
in an encounter in which the patient makes a request for treatment,
the physician responds with a counter-offer involving a treatment
she feels is appropriate, and the patient might respond, etc. Such
a "Conversation for Action" can describe a situation in which an
external observer (such as a computer or health information system)
may be able to track the ILLOCUTIONARY (or Speech Act) STATUS of
negotiations between the patient and physician participants even in
the absence of any adequate model of the illness or propoposed
treatments. The key insight provided by Winograd and Flores is that
the state-transition diagram representing the SOCIAL
(Illocutionary) negotiation of the two parties involved is
generally much, much simpler than any model representing the world
in which those parties are making claims- in short- the system
tracking the status of the 'conversation for action' need not be
concerned with modeling all of the realities of the external world-
a conversation for action is critically dependent upon certain
stereotypical CLAIMS about the status of the world made by the two
parties. Thus a "Conversation for Action" can be readily tracked
and facilitated by a device with little or no ability to model
circumstances in the real world other than the ability to register
claims by specific agents about a domain.

Uses in
technology

In making useful applications of technology to domains
such as healthcare, it is helpful to discriminate between problems
which are very, very hard (such as deep understanding of
pathophysiology as it relates to genetic and various environmental
influences) and problem which are relatively easier, such as
following the status of negotiations between a patient and a health
care provider. Speech Act (Illocutionary) Analysis allows for a
useful understanding of the status of a negotiation between (for
instance) a health care provider and a patient INDEPENDENT of any
well-accepted credible and comprehensive understanding of a disease
process as it might apply to that patient. For this reason, systems
which track the status of PROMISES and REJECTED-PROPOSALS and
ACCEPTED-PROMISES can help us to understand the situations in which
(human or computer) AGENTS find themselves as they attempt to
fulfill ROLES involving other agents, and such systems can
facilitate both human and human-computer systems in achieving
role-associated goals.

In
multiagent universes

Multi-agent systems sometimes use speech act lables to express
the intent of an agent when it sends a message to another agent.
For example the intent "inform" in the message "inform(content)"
may be interpreted as a request that the receiving agent adds the
item "content" to its knowledge-base; this is in contrast to the
message "query(content)" which may be interpreted (depending on the
semantics employed) as a request to see if the item content is
currently in the receiving agents knowledge base. There are at
least two standardisations of speech act labelled messaging KQML and FIPA.

Notes

^
following much cited New Testament ideas like ζάω γάρ ὁ λόγος
ὁ θεός καί ἐνεργής (Hebrews 4:12) in turn based on much cited Old Testament ideas
like כן יהיה דברי אשר יצא מפי לא־ישוב אלי ריקם כי אם־עשה את־אשר
חפצתי והצליח אשר שלחתיו׃ (Isaiah 55:11). Indeed, the very first
chapter of the Bible (Genesis 1) has God creating the world by a
series of speech acts: "Let there be light!" This idea the
Fathers saw echoed in the first words of the Gospel of John,
applied by him to Jesus: "In the
beginning was the Word". See Joseph Hillis Miller Speech acts in
literature for Marcel Proust's allusions to divine
speech acts throughout the Bible.

^
See Smith, B. "Towards a History of Speech Act Theory", at pp.29-61
in Speech Acts, Meaning, and Intentions: Critical Approaches to
the Philosophy of John R. Searle, W. de Gruyter, (Berlin),
1990.

^
Austin's own example of a wedding ceremony (also in Language, Truth and Logic) is an
example of sacramental theology in the Roman Catholic tradition.
Protestants rejected marriage as a sacrament, and viewed ministers
as witnesses not executors of the wedding of the couple, binding
themselves to one another via the speech acts of their vows.

^ :"The term 'social act' and
some of the theory of this sui generis type of linguistic action
are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active
Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a
Contract)."

"A man may see, and hear, and remember, and judge, and
reason; he may deliberate and form purposes, and execute them,
without the intervention of any other intelligent being. They are
solitary acts. But when he asks a question for information, when he
testifies a fact, when he gives a command to his servant, when he
makes a promise, or enters into a contract, these are social acts
of mind, and can have no existence without the intervention of some
other intelligent being, who acts a part in them. Between the
operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I
have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this
very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression
of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They
may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being
known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the
expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed
by words or signs, and known to the other party."

(Reid 1969, 437-438)

From Mulligan, K. Promisings and other social acts - their
constituents and structure. in Mulligan, K., editor Speech
Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist
Phenomenology. Nijhoff, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster 1987.

Also see: Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith "Elements of Speech Act
Theory in the Work of Thomas Reid" in History of Philosophy
Quarterly, 7 (1990), 47–66.